I was not quite sure what to expect. A lot of the narrarative around SF
right now is silicon valley dystopic - clueless tech bros, whitewashing
the city with their undeserved success, shifting the local culture and
ruining the world with addicting, privacy and social institution
shredding yet somehow irresistable technology.

COMPASS was fantastic. Unlike other conferences I’ve been to it
was laser focused on one topic over two days.

The city was also enjoyable, and overcame my worst fear that I would be
embarassed to find myself no different from any of the aforementioned ‘techbros’.

The highlight of my trip was a fortuitous stop at an experimental
computer lab called “Dynamicland”. It has
caught my eye a few times in the past year, enough to have put the
thought in the back of my brain that if I ever got to SF I needed to
check this place out. Through happenstance I met someone at the
conference who knew a volunteer researcher there who was able to welcome
and show me the ropes.

I met some friends in a nearby east-of-the-bay town at a winery staring
back across at the big city, which I think was coincidentally sited on
the old airfield featured in Robin Sloan’s
Sourdough…

Back to Dynamicland, which might be the future we have all been waiting
for. Dynamicland proposes a world where computers are at the same time
completely hidden while also being pervasive and interacting on every
surface. Or at least all the flat surfaces.

They do this by mounting all the hardware in the ceiling: a
computer, a projector, and a camera. The camera observes what is
happening on the the surface receiving the projections
and being observed by the camera and acted upon by the ‘OS’.

What I can’t even begin to explain here is that all ‘computation’ is
embedded in physical sheets of paper, which both serve as the ‘display’
and programmatic definition. A founding principal is that everything
should be self-explaining and approachable by anyone, not locked away
behind syntax and compilers, evident only to the cognoscenti.

Pages defining programs are physically there on the table, interpreted
by the system in the ceiling but viscerally manipulated by what’s
happening below. Here’s a video of a binder of “cool wallpapers”: to get
to the next wallpaper you flip over a new page, which the camera reads
in real time and it switches from running the code from the old page and
brings up the behavior defined by the new page:

This results in programming as an activity that to me felt very similar
to being in a puzzle room: collaborating towards some shared common
goal, but interacting fully in a physical space instead of as a set of
individuals hunched over a keyboard staring at disjointed screens. At
one point someone needed a particular card, so I ran into the other room
to find it, returning a few minutes later to set it on the table, fixing
a problem and moving the moment along.

In the future the hardware and software will be built into self-connecting
light bulbs installed seamlessly everywhere, yielding a computable
canvas shared by all.

Highlight #2 was renting a dockless e-bike on Sunday and
crusing all over. I’m comfortable on a regular bike in most traffic, and
found the roads in the northwest part of the city fairly navigable and
the drivers no more petulant than on my home turf. The bike kicked me
straight up 10 blocks of the steepest hill I think I’ve ever dared to
ride up returning towards downtown from the Presidio and I don’t think I
even broke a sweat.

So that’s two things I got to see for the first time that are rising up
on the future of the world. Before this trip, I was last in SF about 10
years ago - 2008 I think - for WWDC around the time that smartphones and
Twitter were moving quickly along their own uptake/adoption curve. People
coordinated all their conference activity on twitter using the
new-fangled handheld pocket computer. 10 years later iPhones and Twitter
have shifted culture in an at-that-time unforsee-able way.

I’m more optimistic for what these two technologies will bring ten years
from now. I hope it’s a world where I and everyone can ride an e-bike
through a city where the streets are all augmented by Dynamicland
streetlights, providing seamless “in the world” (vs. “on the screen”)
computational cues.